Sendmail as POP3

No, POP/IMAP are used by remote clients to pick up mail from a mailserver. Sendmail doesn't provide POP/IMAP support, you have to add a service (usually an inetd/xinetd one) for this. RedHat 9 is so old (and unsupported by them!) that I can't remember which RPM they're contained in, but if you want them, look for dovecot or just some package called imap/imapd in your repositories. Remember RH9 is only barely supported now even by the fedoralegacy.org project - without that, you'll have multiple vulnerabilities and I wouldn't expect support to last too long. I'd suggest moving to CentOS.

I'm not sure you want POP at all though. Sendmail itself accepts incoming mail for the local domain - that's its job.

Finally remember that the plain text versions of POP and IMAP are scary: they transmit passwords in plain text format over the internet, like telnet. Always use the SSL versions if you have to support remote mail clients.

Thanks for the info. I had no idea RH9 was that old. The only reason I went with that was because we use that at work and I didn't want to learn another distribution. I finally was able to setup Apache, MySQL, and BlueDragon. The only part I'm missing is email. Sendmail is actually installed and running on RedHat9 small and I setup a domain and email account but cannot connect to the server. I get an error 10061. Maybe I have a firewall installed by default and have to open a port? Not sure. I guess I can give CentOS a try.

George

Yes you'd need to open tcp/25 for sendmail.

You'll also need to tell sendmail to accept connections on the outward facing interface - I can't recall what the default was in RH9, but in recent Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS distros it only listens on localhost for security reasons. See /etc/mail/sendmail.mc.

But I really wouldn't advise running with RH9 - you'll find CentOS very familiar (it's a rebuild of current Red Hat Enterprise) and support will last for years.

I just installed CentOS4 and my first task was to install nano. :) But I managed to do that, so I'm proud. :D My question is, do you know if these distros have any firewall installed and if they do, how do I open a port on them?

George

On CentOS either use system-config-securitylevel (think it needs X, probably not installed by minimal Linode installation), edit /etc/sysconfig/iptables directly if you know what you're doing, or else install something like firestarter (easy but needs X), firehol (ok for console, reasonably easy) or shorewall (more complex and probably overboard). See the Linode Wiki security section for a few bit on these. Google to find homepages.

Firehol, probably.

Centos.org in general for support.

Thanks for your help.

George